The Observation Deck

Or east of Lakewood. But I understand what you are saying.

Bill, If you are in the middle of Lakewood, Bay Village and Westlake are both closer than downtown Cleveland.

Tim: I don't think taxes and the condition of the streets or the need for a given number of police have very much to do with fairness. If your streets are 100 years old, they'll be in need of expensive repair. If your city is in the midst of economic outmigration, you'll have more people with less money, more crime, and higher policing costs, and -- no matter how much you spend--more challenges in the classroom. All that adds up to high taxes.

When Avon and Westlake are full of poor people, and their roads are 100 years old, and all their land is covered by cheap and decaying residential architecture, their taxes are going to be pretty high, too. It won't have anything to do with fairness or quality of service.

Bill Call wrote: "If everything is somewhere else why live here"?

Bill

Because eeverything else will be somewhere else and we can return to the sleepy, nice, fun, affordable bedroom community Lakewood has always been.

Close to everything, but just far enough away to be nice.


FWIW



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would residential roads be more affordable to maintain if they were brick?

If the taxes in these so called “niceâ€￾ suburbs are lower, I question how these people get city services without paying for them.

As a suburb is being built out, tax revenue from the new construction can outpace city service costs for a time. Once new construction stops, the bills come due and the revenue stream that was paying these bills is gone. I think it works out to be something of a pyramid scheme.

More insidious for us is that to a lesser or greater extent, we here in Lakewood are subsidizing the outward growth. Road construction projects, gas rates and electric rates are not determined by how efficiently the infrastructure is used. We here in Lakewood have an incredibly high efficient use of infrastructure. The farther out we go, the lower the population density, the less efficient the infrastructure. Tax rates and utility rates don’t take this into account. It’s an expensive penalty that we pay.

Who is to say everything will be in Avon someday? I know a business leader who had the grand idea of moving his company out of downtown a few years back to somewhere near Wooster. And he didn't have any problem getting all his employees to drive from all over Cleveland to the new "campus." Now, though, he has employees quitting in droves because of the cost of the commute, and can't get enough qualified candidates to even apply for the jobs because no one wants to drive that far. So, he plans on moving back to downtown within the next two years. My guess is something similar could happen with places like Avon. It was no problem for years to have employees commute from all across Greater Cleveland when it only cost a handful of bucks. $4 gas slows sprawl. $6 stops it dead in its tracks. $8 will send it in reverse, unless everyone is in a Prius or something. Hopefully Lakewood is ready with plenty to offer.

We're all talking about city services, but the majority of our property taxes are levied by the schools. The reason our taxes are high is because we have a lot of school-age kids relative to the value of the property here. Families in doubles....

"Densely populated" is a double-edged sword. It is efficient from an infrastructure perspective but serving more people with less property causes the property taxes to soar (not necessarily absolutely, but relative to the value of the property, Jeff's point). I knew this before I moved to Lakewood but chose Lakewood anyway because I just like the feel of this city.

if property taxes are mostly to support schools the solution is simple.

Give a property tax break to homeowners over 60. They are unlikely to still have kids or to have kids later. This will encourage old people to move to lakewood: they are less likely to cause trouble. However, many of them will get stuck raising their grandchildren anyways, so that will give the schools something to do.

The homestead reduction exemption already offers a 2.5% discount to qualified seniors.

Separate issue and maybe something better for a new thread. So 55% of the property taxes go to schools. 54% of the population rents. 25% of the households have children. The schools don't have bus expenses or athletic expenses (correct me if we are not pay to play), which would make me think that their cost per student should be lower than peer districts. While it's popular to trumpet our schools, can we discuss their budget and how its funded. Is there some way to allocate this expense more directly to those families who are using the schools? Funding it with property tax doesn't seem quite right for our situation.

What if there was a way to monitor non-owner occupied homes and assess them the commercial property tax. Check my numbers but I believe that residential is .0183 vs commercial at .0340. First set of properties, because they would be easiest to track could be those who are accepting HUD vouchers. These are business owners who are playing by a different set of rules than those who rent out a portion of their duplex that they occupy. Would this help to level the playing field and encourage owner occupied housing?

In 1997 the Ohio Supreme Court found that the state system of funding education was unconstitutional.

I believe that in the last decade, nothing has changed. The manner in which we fund our public education system is unconstitutional.

Shawn: I like where your discussion is going concerning the re-examination of tax rates v. property types/uses, however, direct taxation based on public school use will never fly here, or anywhere else in this country because it goes against the Jeffersonian ideal of equal access to a public education for the whole populace. The evolution of parochial/private education has developed in concert with this principle. If Henry Ford's only offering his car in black, build/buy a different car. Given the fact that the whole kit and kaboodle has been found unconstitutional as it stands, why couldn't the district change its' entire rationale based on a set of tax rules that works best for it? So long as the solution is as equitable to the taxpayer as it is to the student. Anything that encourages owner-occupied housing in Lakewood is worth discussing forever.

How much, if any, of the property tax money (that 55% Shawn mentioned) for the schools goes to the rec department? Or is that funded separately, even though it's run/managed/overseen by the BOE?

For that matter, do any rec department fees end up in the classroom?

It should be a fifty percent tax break for all seniors on primary residence property tax.

The way schools are funded will always be interpretable as a violation of the Constitution. It is easier to amend the Ohio State Constitution than come up with a new way to fund Ohio k12 education. Just add a few lines to the Constitution: "The ways of funding K12 education used so far are ok".

Our tax bill says the following:

Schools 56.13%

Municipality 21.43%

County 17.68%

Library 2.70%

Metroparks 2.06%

It doesn't break down how the money for the schools is spent. I would assume those numbers would come from the Board of Education.